Charles de Lint
“I hear a calling-on music,” she says, “though whether it’s calling us to cross over, or calling something to us, I can’t tell.” He turns to look at her finally, with his hair the glossy black of the ravens, his eyes the blue of that fiddle neither of them has seen yet. He notes the horn that rises from the center of her brow, the equine features that make her face seem so long, the chestnut dreadlocks, the dark, wide-set eyes and the something in those eyes he can’t read. “Does it matter?” he asks. “Everything matters on some level or other.” He smiles. “I think that depends on what story we happen to be in.” “Yours or mine,” she says, her voice soft. “I don’t have a story,” he tells her. Now she smiles. “And mine has no end.” “Listen,” he says. Silence hangs in the air, a thick gauze dropped from the sky like a blanket, deep enough to cut. The black birds are silent. They sit motionless in the dying trees. The fiddler has taken the bow from the strings. The blue fiddle holds its breath. “I don’t hear anything,” she says, He nods. “This is what my story sounds like.” From “Seven for a Secret,” in Moonlight and Vines, by Charles de Lint (1995) Charles de Lint is a Canadian author who started writing in the 1980’s and is an influential figure in the genre of contemporary fantasy. He has written 36 novels and 35 books of short fiction; his short-story collection ''Moonlight and Vines ''won the World Fantasy Award in 2000, and he has won numerous other smaller awards. The genre of contemporary fantasy, of which de Lint is one of the founding authors, mixes magical elements into ordinary settings. De Lint’s style borrows concepts from European mythology, and many of his works are set in the fictional North American city of Newport. His stories are filled with ordinary, unremarkable people getting mixed up with fantastic mythological entities, and perfectly human characters who wholeheartedly embrace the magic most of their peers refuse to notice. In most of his stories, the everyday individual is the narrator, stumbling through events they don’t understand, and occasionally seeking out characters who are more aware of supernatural phenomenon for advice. This gives the reader a sense of the strangeness of magic in an ordinary city, carrying them along as the narrators come to grips with impossible events. These stories are ethereal and impossible, but the gradual shift from disbelief to acceptance that most of de Lint’s narrators go through is powerful enough to make a reader believe that the events from the stories could happen, blurring the distinction between fiction and real life. This author is important to me because throughout middle and high school I read every fantasy book I could get my hands on, and this short-story collection really stuck with me as something different. Like any child, I knew myths and ghost stories, but the way de Lint twists familiar concepts to suit the problems of a modern setting breathed new life into well-worn ideas. Melancholy and dark as many of his works are, they still have a bright, hopeful strangeness, and many of his characters learn applicable life lessons from their bizarre experiences. It’s very appealing for a reader who just can’t bring herself to believe in magic, and the plausibility of many of de Lint’s stories is something I would like to be able to accomplish. Jenny Simso 5-3-12